1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to information technology and particularly to a technique for aggregating, organizing, and optimizing an organization's networks in order to provide a multi-layered, multiply-administered, universal network management environment using a Global Information Architecture (“GIA”).
2. Description of Related Art
Multiple waves of computing have changed the way that organizations do business. No longer are computers a way of handling just bookkeeping or inventory control; now, virtually every function an organization performs has a related object stored on a networked system of computers, many of which take part in automated procedures.
The explosion in automation has resulted in organizations deploying multiple networks in multiple locations to support the systems they have deployed. As automation has expanded, so have network technologies, increasing the need for a universal tool, which speaks a universal language. Today, there are vendors of networking equipment working within the seven-layer Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model utilizing multiple physical links, often over several media types. There are protocols at virtually every layer that require configuration and management.
Not only does network management today involve managing multiple networks of different types within any given facility, but today's cooperatively wired world requires that these networks interoperate with other locations within the same organization, and even amongst different organizations. In many cases an organization's challenge of managing its networks is as great as, or even greater than, the challenge of supporting its applications. Moreover, in the presence of increasing demands of security and the proliferation of threats, this challenge is becoming ever more complex. Further complications arise when new generations of network management appliances are added to existing network infrastructure.
Traditionally, network management appliances such as routers have been specialized machines with proprietary hardware components that support network operations. However, as microprocessors have become faster, network management software running on general purpose hardware has become an increasingly practical alternative for managing network traffic. Now, all but the highest-throughput network routing applications can be managed using software-based network appliances.
Many of these network management software applications are open-source or very low cost applications. In fact, the major new competitors to the current proprietary network management appliance vendors are not other proprietary network management appliance vendors, but rather are providers of cheap—or free—software that runs on inexpensive, general purpose machines.
Although saving money is often a very useful goal, given the complexity of managing an organization's networks, for large organizations there is a far more important goal to be achieved than finding a low-cost alternative to existing proprietary network appliance vendors: providing a simpler and more effective way of collectively managing their networks. However, no commercial solution has been able to achieve this goal. Although there have been big improvements in looking at information collectively, e.g., portal software and data mining software, and in improving network throughput, no work has been done in relating the problems of managing disparate information sources on different networks with the problem of managing those networks themselves.
Ideally, an organization would have a network management application that understands the organization's goals for using its networks and the structure of the networks it is using, and is able to translate organizational goals into parameters to be used by network appliances to make networks perform properly in support of those goals. This application would also be “globally-deployed” (i.e., deployed on all of the organization's networks). In practice, the information management/network management divide described above has prevented that from happening. Moreover, not only have customers not envisioned such a possibility, proprietary network appliance vendors, which see themselves primarily as packet movers and not collective data managers, are not in a position to bridge the divide.